Part 40 (1/2)
”Now I am afraid of him,” said Mr. Devenish gravely, and he added a shrewd saying to explain his fear. ”Here's the great difference which makes art and politics incompatible. The men who succeed in politics are the men who don't worry. The men who succeed in art are the men who do. Yes, I am afraid of him now, and if I hit hard, Mrs. Rames, bear me no grudge. I shall hit hard because I must.”
Cynthia's heart warmed to him. She laughed joyously.
”I'll bear no grudge, Mr. Devenish.”
”By the way, why isn't he here to-night? He ought to be.”
”He was here,” Cynthia replied. ”But a telephone message was brought to him. Some one had called at our house who was urgent to see him. So he went home.”
Mr. Devenish saw Cynthia into her carriage and she drove back to Curzon Street. The visitor was still with Harry Rames in his study when she reached home. As she went up to her room she heard his voice through the door, and once she waked up from her sleep and in the small hours she again heard his voice. He was in the hall taking his leave of Harry Rames. Cynthia switched on the light and looked at her watch. It was three o'clock in the morning. Drowsily she asked herself who this visitor could be, but she was asleep again almost before the question was formulated in her mind.
CHAPTER XXVIII
WIRELESS
Harry Rames, however, told her who it was the next morning as they sat at breakfast. He had come down late and Cynthia looked at him with anxious eyes.
”You were kept late in your study?” she said, thinking of the critical week which lay in front of him.
”Yes.”
Harry Rames laid down his Sunday newspaper.
”Walter Hemming was here.”
”Hemming?”
To Cynthia the name was quite unfamiliar. There had been no Walter Hemming at Bramling.
”He was one of my officers on the _Perhaps_. He has got together some money, has bought the old s.h.i.+p and is off to the South.”
”He takes up your work?”
”Yes. I never saw a man so enthusiastic. Suppose he reaches the Pole, what then?” Harry Rames laughed contemptuously.
”Aren't there discoveries to be made, maps to be drawn of that continent and something to be learned from the soundings?” asked Cynthia, recollecting Harry Rames's own book upon his voyage. He shook his head.
”That's all tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, Cynthia. You have got to surround your expedition with a scientific halo. It gets you money, and official support, and the countenance of the learned societies. But the man who goes south into the Antarctic goes with just one reason--to reach the Pole. Why? You can't give a rational answer to that Cynthia. No one can. Such men are just driven on by a torment of their souls.”
No stranger watching Harry Rames as he speculated with an indulgent smile upon the aimlessness of Walter Hemming's long itinerary could have imagined that he had once himself led just such an expedition.
Even Cynthia found the fact difficult of belief. By so complete a dissociation of spirit he was cut off from the race of the wanderers.
”Let a man become insane in the East,” he continued, ”and he's looked upon as a holy man, touched by the finger of G.o.d. The fellows who go South and North are our holy men of the West.” He turned back again to his newspaper, and then uttered an exclamation:
”They have offered that Under Secretarys.h.i.+p to Edgington!”
”Of course he'll refuse it,” said Cynthia.
”He has taken it. There's the first defection.”